He thought about how it had gone wrong. He and Anatoly had become careless. They should have met in a place from which they had a good view of the approaches all around, so that they could have been forewarned of any approach. But who would have thought that Jane might follow him? He was the victim of the most appallingly bad luck: that the wounded boy was allergic to penicillin; that Jane had heard Anatoly speak; that she was able to recognize a Russian accent; and that Ellis had turned up to give her courage. It was bad luck. But the history books do not remember the men who almost achieved greatness. I did my best, Papa, he thought; and he could almost hear his father's reply: I'm not interested in whether you did your best, I want to know whether you succeeded or failed.
He was approaching the village. He decided to turn in. He was sleeping badly, but there was nothing else to do but go to bed. He headed for home.
Somehow the fact that he still had Jane was not much consolation. Her discovery of his secret seemed to have made them less intimate, not more. A new distance had grown up between them, even though they were planning their return home and even talking about their new life back in Europe.
At least they still hugged one another in bed at night. That was something.
He went into the shopkeeper's house. He had expected Jane to be in bed already, but to his surprise she was still up. She spoke as soon as he walked in. "A runner came for you from Masud. You have to go to Astana. Ellis is wounded."
Ellis wounded. Jean-Pierre's heart beat faster. "How?"
"Nothing serious. I gather he's got a bullet in his bum."
"I'll go first thing in the morning."
Jane nodded. "The runner will go with you. You can be back by nightfall."
"I see." Jane was making sure he had no opportunity of meeting with Anatoly. Her caution was unnecessary: Jean-Pierre had no way of arranging such a meeting. Besides, Jane was guarding against a minor peril and overlooking a major one. Ellis was wounded. That made him vulnerable. Which changed everything.
Now Jean-Pierre could kill him.
Jean-Pierre was awake all night, thinking about it. He imagined Ellis, lying on a mattress under a fig tree, gritting his teeth against the pain of a smashed bone, or perhaps pale and weak from loss of blood. He saw himself preparing an injection. "This is an antibiotic to prevent infection of the wound," he would say, then he would inject him with an overdose of digitalis, which would give him a heart attack.
A natural heart attack was unlikely, but by no means impossible, in a man of thirty-four years, especially one who had been exercising strenuously after a long period of relatively sedentary work. Anyway, there would be no inquest, no post mortem, and no suspicions: in the West they would not doubt that Ellis had been wounded in action and had died of his wounds. Here in the Valley, everyone would accept Jean-Pierre's diagnosis. He was trusted as much as any of Masud's closest lieutenants— quite naturally, for he had sacrificed as much as any of them for the cause, it must seem to them. No, the only doubter would be Jane. And what could she do?
He was not sure. Jane was a formidable opponent when she was backed up by Ellis; but Jane alone was not. Jean-Pierre might be able to persuade her to stay in the Valley for another year: he could promise not to betray the convoys, then find a way to reestablish contact with Anatoly and just wait for his chance to pinpoint Masud for the Russians.
He gave Chantal her bottle at two A.M., then went back to bed. He did not even try to sleep. He was too anxious, too excited and too frightened. As he lay there waiting for the sun to rise, he thought of all the things that could go wrong: Ellis might refuse treatment, he, Jean-Pierre, might get the dosage wrong, Ellis might have suffered a mere scratch and be walking around normally, Ellis and Masud might even have left Astana already.
Jane's sleep was troubled by dreams. She tossed and turned beside him, occasionally muttering incomprehensible syllables. Only Chantal slept well.
Just before dawn Jean-Pierre got up, lit the fire and went to the river to bathe. When he came back, the runner was in his courtyard, drinking tea made by Fara and eating yesterday's left-over bread. Jean-Pierre took some tea, but could not eat anything.
Jane was feeding Chantal on the roof. Jean-Pierre went up and kissed them both goodbye. Every time he touched Jane he remembered how he had punched her, and he felt his whole being shudder with shame. She seemed to have forgiven him, but he could not forgive himself.
He led his old mare through the village and down to the riverside, then, with the runner at his side, he headed downstream. Between here and Astana there was a road, or what passed for a road in Five Lions: a strip of rocky earth, eight or ten feet wide and more or less flat, suitable for wooden carts or army jeeps although it would destroy an ordinary car within minutes. The Valley was a series of narrow rocky gorges broadening out at intervals to form small cultivated plains, a mile or two long and less than a mile wide, where the villagers scraped a living from the unwilling soil by hard work and clever irrigation. The road was good enough for Jean-Pierre to ride on the downhill stretches. (The horse was not good enough for him to ride uphill.)
The Valley must have been an idyllic place once upon a time, he thought as he rode south in the bright morning sunshine. Watered by the Five Lions River, made secure by its high valley walls, organized according to ancient traditions, and undisturbed except by a few butter carriers from Nuristan and the occasional ribbon salesman from Kabul, it must have been a throwback to the Middle Ages. Now the twentieth century had overtaken it with a vengeance. Almost every village had suffered some bomb damage: a water mill ruined, a meadow pitted with craters, an ancient wooden aqueduct smashed to splinters, a rubble-and-mortar bridge reduced to a few stepping-stones in the fast-moving river. The effect of all this on the economic life of the Valley was evident to Jean-Pierre's careful scrutiny. This house was a butcher's shop, but the wooden slab out front was bare of meat. This patch of weeds had once been a vegetable garden, but its owner had fled to Pakistan. There was an orchard, with fruit rotting on ground when it should have been drying on a roof ready to be stored for the long, cold winter: the woman and children who used to tend the orchard were dead, and the husband was a full-time guerrilla. That heap of mud and stones had been a mosque, and the villagers had decided not to rebuild it because it would probably get bombed again. All this waste and destruction happened because men such as Masud tried to resist the tide of history, and bamboozled the ignorant peasants into supporting them. With Masud out of the way, all this would end.
And with Ellis out of the way, Jean-Pierre could deal with Masud.
He wondered, as they approached Astana toward noon, whether he would find it difficult to stick the needle in. The idea of killing a patient was so grotesque that he did not know how he would react. He had seen patients die, of course; but even then he was consumed by regret that he could not save them. When he had Ellis helpless before him, and the needle in his hand, would he be tortured by doubt, like Macbeth, or vacillate, like Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment?
They went through Sangana, with its cemetery and sandy beach, then followed the road around a bend in the river. There was a stretch of farmland in front of them and a cluster of houses up on the hillside. A minute or two later a boy of eleven or twelve approached them across the fields and led them not to the village on the hill, but to a large house at the edge of the farmland.